


Regret Message

by WildandWhirling



Series: Between the Waves [4]
Category: 1789 - バスティーユの恋人たち | 1789: Les Amants de la Bastille - Takarazuka Revue, 1789: Les Amants de la Bastille - Various Composers/Attia & Chouquet
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22591315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildandWhirling/pseuds/WildandWhirling
Summary: On the matter of peasant superstitions.
Relationships: Ronan Mazurier/Lazare de Peyrol
Series: Between the Waves [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1038053
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7





	Regret Message

“How did you learn to read?” He asks it when they’re in bed together, Ronan a comfortable weight against his chest. 

“Mm?” Ronan is never at his most aware when they’re like this, even though he’s sure to ask a hundred questions in several hours when Lazare is _trying_ to sleep. 

“In Paris, I know most men can write their names,” Lazare says, thumb stroking along the small of his back, “Even the servants can do so, with a certain degree of difficulty. However, in the country, without the same access to education, it surely can’t always be so simple. Especially for a peasant. And yet you...” He holds Ronan closer, hand splaying across his back with a possessiveness that’s totally unknown to him. “Learned enough to make yourself a nuisance.” 

Ronan props himself up on his arm, looking at him through half-closed eyes. “Mm, perhaps I can’t tell you. You might need to find some way to get it out of me.”  
  
Lazare takes Ronan’s chin, running a finger along his throat, Ronan’s pulse beneath him thrumming, his lover suddenly _very_ awake. He doesn’t believe he’ll ever be able to get over it, having Ronan here, having him so responsive to everything that he does, every touch. “Ronan…”

“Little...bit….more?” Ronan looks at him, and there is no sign of fear, even though Lazare was openly caressing one of the most vulnerable places of his body, and if he trusted the wrong person with that, then…

He chooses not to think of it, only pinning Ronan to the bed, his hold loose enough that it would be very easy for Ronan to wriggle out of it, if he wanted to. Ronan is shorter than him, scrawnier, but he’s agile enough, quick enough, that if they were ever in a situation where they were truly fighting again, Lazare knows very well that it would have to be a priority to keep Ronan contained, because if he was given a single out… (They are _not_ fighting one another, he reminds himself. One another’s sides, yes, but not one another. There is a difference. For the time being, at least.)

Instead, Ronan only gives an easy, exhilarated laugh, and Lazare can’t resist kissing him, tasting that lust for life on his lips.

When they part, Lazare doesn’t resume their old distance, only resting his forehead against Ronan’s. “Brat.”

“Alright, alright, you’ve made your point, you’ve made your point,” Ronan wriggles out, and Lazare lets him. He doesn’t go far, only returning to resting against Lazare’s chest, moving one of Lazare’s hands to the top of his head as if Lazare was, in fact, a large doll. They’re quiet then, Lazare stroking Ronan’s hair, smoothing out the unruly tufts, scratching his scalp and enjoying the contented way Ronan eases into it. There was the initial passion that brought them together, the intensity of two separate elements clashing and flaring together that has never died out (that he doesn’t believe will, even if, by some miracle, they both live to be old men), but, more than anything else, they live in the moments like this, where anything else seems…...not as if it doesn’t exist, because it is impossible for Lazare’s mind, ever fixated on a thousand things and thoroughly entrenched in a sense of duty, to fully forget anything, least of all his own sense of obligation and the accompanying sense of guilt that flows from putting it aside.

Instead, it is more like nothing else matters. That it might matter, in a week, a day. A minute. But that, here, they are together, the only sound in the room the ticking of the golden clock on the mantelpiece and the steady beating of Ronan’s heart.

“I was about five, six years old,” Ronan says, finally, taking a hammer to the fragile silence and shattering it like glass, “My mother’d just died. Childbirth. The baby didn’t last long afterwards.” Ronan is so animated that when he’s like this, still and pensive, his voice flat, there is a feeling of something wrong. It’s as if someone changed the laws of the universe so that day would become night.  
  
“And she used to tell us stories about how, if you write a wish down and drop it in a river with something small, like a rag or a bit of bread or cheese, your wish’ll come true. I didn’t have anything to lose, and I was a kid, so I thought….I thought it might happen. You don’t realize things like that when you’re a kid, death isn’t real, you know?” Ronan turns over so that he’s staring up at the ceiling, and Lazare can only continue to stroke his hair, unsure of what else he _can_ do. 

“I know.” (He tries not to think of his own, firm belief, the first few weeks in his grandfather’s mansion, that it had all been a terrible mistake and that his father would arrive any day to pick him up in his arms and take him back to be with his mother and dog. Foolish, naive, stupid creature that he was then.)

He had never prepared for this, had never considered it as a possibility. When he had fretted over the possibility of taking a lover in the past, one consistent worry was the fear of softening, of giving anyone else the power to hurt him. Worse, though, he realized, was Ronan showing his vulnerability to him and having no idea what to do. If he had been shot, if he had broken his leg, Lazare would know what to do, and would be able to quickly rush him over to a qualified doctor. But there is no surgeon for this, no cure that Lazare can purchase. All he can do is hope that Ronan can understand what he means to say with his hands and his silence, even if he himself doesn’t know it. 

“I spent hours, between jobs, just writing my name with a stick. I traded with one of the other boys, the son of a lawyer, to teach me what his father taught him, for a few marbles I’d been able to get my hands on. Some nights, I don’t think I got any sleep. Because it was up with one job, then going onto another, then a few hours practicing. One time, Solène found me asleep in a field. But it was alright,” Ronan shrugs his shoulders, “I managed.” 

For someone as relentless about boasting to the world how much he’d suffered as a result of being poor, Ronan has an aversion to being truly pitied that would seem contradictory if it wasn’t so deeply, intimately familiar to Lazare. Perhaps, on some level, that is why they get along so well. “Anyway, I finally got a piece of paper, a bottle, and some ink, and I tried it. And...nothing happened. For at least a week afterwards, I thought, ‘This is it, this is when she comes back.’ But…” he shrugs, and Lazare can still see traces of that early, crushing disappointment weighing down, “Nothing. Probably sounds stupid, huh? I went through all that work for nothing.” 

Lazare hesitates before kissing his forehead. A foolish peasant superstition, yes, but…

Ronan generally likes that, he knows. Any affection, all affection, whatever he can give. And so if anything can comfort him, then surely…

“You did the best you could with the information you had at the time, and obviously put it to use afterwards, regardless of your reason for it initially. You have initiative, Ronan, then and now. It has,” he pauses, realizing mid-breath what he’s in the process of saying, but also realizing that it’s better to be done with it than to try to protect himself and then subject himself to Ronan’s relentless teasing. “Always been one of the traits of yours I admire the most. Now,” he adds, before Ronan believes that he’s surrendering himself completely to sentiment, “If only you could temper it with prudence and a speck of obedience.” 

“Mm,” Ronan leans over him, their positions from before reversed, and even though there’s still a certain weight over his smile, he is _Ronan_ once again, infuriating and vibrant and insolent. “You’d have to beat it into me first.” 

* * *

  
  


The fall of Lazare’s boots against the pavement is steady as he makes his way to the Seine. It had rained earlier, the gray clouds darkening the sunset, and the pavement is still silver and slick in the moonlight. No streetlights light the way, the authorities having decided that the full moon above provides enough, and so he travels as humans have for thousands of years before, under the cover of night. (A lamplighter might be hired, for a fee, but he does not want this trip reported to the police, his affairs indignantly spread out for the world to see as if they were the morning’s laundry.) The streets are more or less deserted, as much as the streets of Paris ever are, and he strides on with such single minded determination that the few that would have impeded him scatter away. Here, he is not the Comte de Peyrol ( _Colonel_ de Peyrol having been murdered not long before, his military career destroyed in front of him while he did as he always did and smiled and submitted), not the embodiment of royal authority, nor anyone of note, simply one more shadow moving between the gray streets of the city, passing over them like a ghost. 

In the distance, the rush of the Seine, emboldened by the rain from before, grows louder. He would know it by heart anyway, his feet know the streets of Paris by night now (he dares not go out during the day; the occasional pickpocket or harlot is nothing compared to a mob of them set on his blood) with the same kind of instinctual, methodical knowledge as how to service a pistol or ride a horse. It is a rhythm that his body has set for itself, each stride with the knowledge of a hundred strides in the same spot before it, even as the autumn’s chilled air, invigorated by the river, blasts his face. 

This is no new walk for him, now that he has nothing to go home to during the night, and nothing to distract his mind from it during the day. 

It is a folly, a form of madness, he knows. He learned, many, many years ago, that hope is a pointless, futile endeavour. They played their parts, did as they ought, and didn’t rebel, and they could continue. Not happily, perhaps, but continue, and that was all that life required. One generation to succeed another.

He had believed that, at least. 

And then he had met Ronan, and suddenly, for the first time in his life, really, he had _wanted_ something. Ronan with his smiles and his kisses and his loud complaining and his faith in him, despite every other circumstance in their first and second meetings being enough cause for any sane man to run far away (Ronan was not sane). Ronan who had taken his face in his rough hands and told him that everything would be better, one day, without considering whether a world that Ronan was proud to live in would be one that Lazare would want to. 

Or what would happen to him when Ronan was no longer there to fill it. 

His hand moves to his pocket, feeling for the raise in it. Good. This trip would be no use without it. 

Though this trip will achieve little use regardless, he knows. 

The Seine’s waters are an inky black, the moon above streaking the dense ripples with silver. For a moment, looking at it, he forgets the stench of over half a million souls that it carries up from it, and the bitter wind that comes off of it and makes him clutch his coat tighter around him. Instead, he only sees the Seine’s waters, hypnotic and mercurial and sublime. However, he turns, sees the empty air surrounding him, and everything floods back, and he is in the world of the living once again. 

He had never noticed such things, before Ronan. The river had only just been a river before him, something that could be useful, depending on its purpose, or dangerous, if one of the fools under his command fell into it while crawling back to barracks after a night spent in one of the various taverns dotted around Paris. But Ronan….there was a sense of wonder in everything for him. The stars, the skies, the river, the streets, he saw them all with entirely different eyes, sometimes critical, sometimes angry and frustrated, when he believed that they could be better than they were, and sometimes with an awe that Lazare had only seen in a very small number of men’s faces in church. 

And he had infected him with it too, damn him. 

His hand rests along the cool glass in his pocket, fingers running along the rim of it. This was foolish. It was utterly ridiculous for him to- 

He glances around, like a common thief. ( _Or a murderer_ , his mind supplied, and it is as if the wind had been taken out of his lungs, because that is what he is now. Or, rather, what he always had been, and that Ronan had made him forget, for a time, though his sister obviously had not. Always the more intelligent of the two of them. The Mazurier that had the good sense not to fall in love with him, though if his sources are correct, she is halfway into falling in love with the Du Puget girl. The one whose eyes screamed murder when she saw him in the graveyard.) 

No one here to see this, good. 

He takes the glass out of his pocket, looking at it. There is nothing to particularly distinguish it, a clear glass bottle, the type that can be found smashed in the streets on any day, but it is what is inside it that is of value, a scrap of paper with one line written on it, a scrap of cloth stuffed in with it. 

It’s strange, he had had months to speak to Ronan, to tell him everything that he had imagined saying to him, but something had always held him back. His de Peyrol pride preventing him from being too open with a peasant, his unwillingness to be truly vulnerable to anyone, his conviction, at the start, that things would not be serious. (As if he ever treated anything flippantly in his life, he had known from the beginning, it had just been easy to pretend otherwise.) He can count them, all the minutes and hours and days that he had looked to Ronan and kept silent, every time that he had brushed him aside for his work, because _they had time_ and _he would make things better next time_. 

And now, every wish, every desire, every dream is left to two sentences in a glass bottle. 

_Let me see him once again. Let him be happy._

If they are never in a relationship again, if he can never kiss him again, if he can never even exchange a single word to him, knowing that he and Ronan exist in the same universe, in the same lifetime would at least bring him some comfort. Just to see his Ronan as he remembers him best, taking life as a dare, before life-before _he_ had ruined him.

The laws of rationality cannot bring Ronan back to his arms, they cannot comfort him when he wakes from a nightmare, they cannot grab hold of his hand when he feels lonely and is too proud to ask for the solace, they cannot give him anything that might make returning to his apartment every day something that has any value besides as a means of protection from the mob. 

They cannot tell Ronan Mazurier that he loves him, that he did, for so long, so much, so that he felt his heart squeeze simply thinking about him, that it still does (that it feels like a snake wrapping around it now, that he cannot escape it, that everywhere he goes, Ronan is there, there, there.) 

They cannot let Ronan Mazurier forgive him. (They cannot help him forgive himself, his dreams have stopped being about suffocating cold and dark and the rap of a walking stick against stone, but about a fortress in flames and thick blood drenching his body while Ronan watches him silently, accusingly, chest covered in bullet holes, no matter how far he might run or try to plead.) 

He clutches onto the neck for a long while, knowing what’s brought him here but unwilling to make the final step. Once he does it, it is out of his hands, and he will have no control over it. Then, he sighs. 

This will not work. But it is the only thing left. 

With one swift, smooth effort, he flings the bottle into the air, and for a moment, the glass catches the moonlight, so that it looks like a falling star trapped in the black waters. His eyes remain fixed on it as it bobs up and down, in and out of sight, before finally it disappears, and still he watches, because he does not know what else to do. 

Superstitious nonsense, he knows, sparing one last appraising look at the waters. 

Still, he finds his heart sinking when he returns to a still, empty house and collapses into a cold bed. 

Ronan is gone, and there is no force in heaven or hell that can change that.

**Author's Note:**

> There are two things that prompted this: One is the song Regret Message, because it is the Ultimate Angst Song for when a character fucks up, the second is a genuine peasant tradition recorded by Gregory of Tours in 6th century France, that says, "a multitude of peasants used to throw such linen cloths and rags as the men used as garments. And some threw in the fleeces of sheep, or masses of cheese or wax, or bread of various kinds, each doing according to his means," basically a pagan sacrifice tradition that lasted some time into Christianity. It probably wouldn't last in the same form into the 18th century, and even if it did, it could be very different in Ronan's region than in the region where Gregory recorded it. Still, it happened to fit in nicely with what I was going for, and so I added the rag as a nod to that.


End file.
